


Ready to Comply

by barbaricyawp



Series: In Hell I'll Be in Good Company [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Past Sexual Assault, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-08-02 20:29:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16312175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barbaricyawp/pseuds/barbaricyawp
Summary: Bucky receives therapy in Wakanda for his trauma.





	Ready to Comply

**Author's Note:**

  * For [antivol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/antivol/gifts).



> Let me start by ~~blaming~~ thanking [Antivol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/antivol) for suggesting that Bucky would benefit from this particular kind of therapy. This fic is for you, Antivol. Thank you for reading each chapter and leaving such lovely comments.
> 
> This takes place within chapters 1-5 of "Myself Am Hell," and is referenced in chapter 10. It will probably not make much sense to you if you haven't weathered that storm of a fic.

 

* * *

And what shoulder, & what art,  
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?  
And when thy heart began to beat,  
What dread hand? & what dread feet? 

-William Blake, "The Tyger"

* * *

 

“Part of what makes trauma so tricky is that recollections of those events are stored in the long-term memory, obscured. Worse, your long-term memory is so compromised that your brain cannot discern when the memory is short term, that is the present, or long term, the past. EMDR therapy asks you to recall the traumatic event, moving the memory into the prefrontal cortex with the short-term memory. As you recall this event, you will track with your eyes my fingers moving like this.”

The doctor extends two fingers straight into the air and, for a strange moment, Bucky thinks she is about to _cross_ him, but instead she just waves them from side to side. He doesn’t track the motion, only observes her face.

“This is a lot of information for a brain, especially yours, to process. And as such, the image of the traumatic event will lose its emotional charge and—Sergeant Barnes, are you listening?”

Bucky nods, uncertain what he’s being asked. Of course, he was listening. Did it look as if he were not?

“You’re going to ask me to remember what happened to me while watching your fingers move from side to side so that the memory will upset me less. Is that correct, Dr. Achebe?”

Bucky’s therapist, Dr. Achebe, is an elderly woman from the River Tribe. As a doctor, she is fastidious in her explanations of Bucky’s psyche, and extremely careful with diagnosis. She works in tandem with a team of mental health practitioners (including two psychiatrists with differing specialties, a neurosurgeon, and a deprogramming expert from Trinidad who occasionally Skypes in and thinks they are somewhere in Mombasa).

She wears a brightly colored blazer for each session and sits in the chair that faces away from the door so that Bucky can see it and her at all times. She doesn't expect Bucky to sit. She doesn’t have a ceiling fan, or a fan of any kind.

Bucky likes that she is nearly blind and often cannot make eye contact with him or observe his body language. He also appreciates that, when he declined medication, she didn’t press the matter. Of everyone on his team, Bucky feels most comfortable with Dr. Achebe.

He still doesn’t trust her.

“Does that sound like something you’d be willing to try, Sergeant Barnes?” she asks, politely.

Bucky wonders about this Sergeant Barnes business, if Steve put everybody here up to it. Called ahead and demanded Bucky be referred to by rank. Why else would they all address him as such? 

“Yeah, I think I can do that.”

Dr. Achebe nods. She is not much of a smiler and this, too, Bucky appreciates. “I’ll prompt you while you track my fingers. Please don’t be concerned with whether or not you _should_ be feeling what you feel. Just sit with these feelings and report back to me.”

Bucky nods. He hates this part of the session most, when the doctor has to explain what is _about_ to happen to him. He wishes they'd just dive in. The anticipation is nauseating, like being taunted. Not for the first time, he wishes he had another hand, just so he could hold it.

“Are you ready to begin?”

“Ready to comply,” Bucky says and winces. He never means to say it.

Clever woman that she is, Dr. Achebe seizes on this. “Could you think about that phrase for a moment? ‘Ready to comply?’”

Bucky takes a deep breath. He hates this part, too. The talking. “I am r—”

Dr. Achebe shushes him abruptly. “No need to talk to me about it, we’ll do that later. Just think about it and track with your eyes.”

This is a surprise, not needing to talk right away, and very nearly a pleasant one. Dr. Achebe moves her outstretched fingers from side to side. Though he feels vaguely as if he’s being hypnotized, Bucky tracks the motions of her fingers.

_Ready to comply._

The words are so ingrained in him, it takes a moment to think about what they mean. HYDRA always made the asset say it before it was about to do something terrible or have something terrible done to it. The expression is brutally carved into its social cues. And once the asset admitted to it, “Ready to comply,” a pleasant haze always fell over it. The burden of decision lifted from its shoulders. Atlas free at last.

Even when the terrible things did happen. If the asset was ready to comply, the effects of complying were dampened. Muffled and farther away. Easier than resisting. Than fighting tooth and nail every scrapping moment.

And at first, he fought, didn't he? At first, he fought them on everything from eating to drinking to sleeping to talking. Then, he gave up battles, figuring he needed to strategize for the war. He let them drug his food and water, ate it and secretly savored being separated from reality under the haze of sedatives. Eating meant sleeping. And eventually that's how they got him, chipping away fragments of him at a time.

Left, right, left, right. Bucky is beginning to get dizzy.

Dr. Achebe lowers her hand. They make eye contact again. “Could you rate your distress at that image from a scale of one to ten, ten being the highest?” 

An impossible question. Bucky falters. “Zero,” he says, uncertain if he feels anything.

Dr. Achebe doesn’t question it. “Alright, please put yourself back into that memory again. And follow my fingers.”

 _Ready to comply_. What typical HYDRA bullshit. It was never really ready to comply, so much as ready to let go. Let go of its body, let go of the decisions. The terrible things still happened, no matter how prepared the asset was. The asset still murdered in cold blood, murdered entire families just to get at one member. The child was still dead after the asset caused the car accident. The wife still cried when she saw what had happened.

And even when it did comply, even when it did everything right and was faithfully _good_ for them, they still used it. They still used the asset’s body until it was wrung out. 

Left, right, left, right.  Bucky’s brain stutters on the image of _wrung out_. At first, he’s strangled by the visual itself: the asset left face down on the concrete with its thighs still parted. Just a crumpled pile of hurt and humiliation.  Left, right. And then just the words, _wrung out._ Where did that come from? Did a HYDRA agent say it to him, or did he think of it himself?

Dr. Achebe stops.

“Could you rate your distress for me again?”

“Four,” he says, but can’t ground this number in any particular certainty.

“What did you notice this time?”

“I don’t know if any of my thoughts are my own,” Bucky says, not without a tinge of panic.

Sensing his panic, she immediately brings her fingers back up to track, and Bucky follows them gratefully, letting them be an anchor. He feels his head jerk from side to side, his eyeballs strain at the corners of his sockets.

Some of his thoughts must be his own, it can’t all be HYDRA in there. Otherwise, how else would he remember Steve? How else would he have clawed out of that pitted void of memory and into this version of himself? He hadn't been complacent the whole time. He had smiled at Steve, remembered his name, kept his secrets.

“What did you notice?”

“I’m not the man I was before HYDRA,” he hesitates, “but I’m not the man that HYDRA made me either.”

“Do you think that is something you can change?”

He pauses, unable to think straight enough to get any words into his mouth. Dr. Achebe brings her fingers up again.

Bucky has come a long way since he first met Steve in that cell. Every memory then was hard-earned, just barely reclaimed each time. Even when the asset could piece together a memory, it had to be carefully concealed, shoved to the edges of its memory where he could only just barely glimpse at it.

It isn’t like that anymore. _He_ isn’t like that anymore.

Left, right.

Well, not always. Memory comes and goes in waves, and Bucky is not always present when these memories take over. Sometimes, he wishes he were the asset again, just so he could lower the heavy load of being himself.

“Maybe not permanently,” he says, interrupting the movement of her fingers. He looks away at this admission, unable to admit that he’s given up on even a part himself. If Steve heard him say something like that… 

But Dr. Achebe isn’t heartbroken. She simply nods. “Is that something you can live with?” 

“I think I have to,” he says, before she can lift her fingers again.

“Alright,” she says. “Sit with that for a moment.”

Bucky stalls again, this time unable to grasp onto any thought. He tracks her fingers numbly, noticing the wrinkles along her knuckles, the clean, pink half-moons of her nail beds.

 _Sit with this._ Sit with never being yourself. Sit with never knowing yourself. Sit with knowing they reached into your brain and scooped all the good parts out of you, everything about you that made you worthwhile. Sit with knowing you're left with what they wanted you to be. Sit with knowing you’ve lost something fundamental to existence: selfhood. Sit with the forcible obliteration of you. Sit with this.

Left, right.

Why is he even doing this? He hates all of it, all the therapy and treatment, and still might never be what Steve needs him to be anyway. All of it for nothing. This weird finger-tracking therapy for nothing. The MRI machine for nothing. The hours of cognitive behavioral therapy that leaves him weepy and hurting and wrung out...

 _Wrung out._ What the fuck is it with HYDRA phrasing that makes it so sticky, oozing into the crevices of his brain so deep it’s impossible to scrub out. _Ready to comply. Order through pain. I like being of use._

Left, right, left, right.

Skin pools around the ring on Dr. Achebe's middle finger. The room blurs in his effort to keep track of her fingers.

At least he isn’t expected to talk. He’s thought the words _ready to comply_ and considered the cold fact of his sexual abuse so many times that they seem distant now. Like seeing the monster jump out of the closet in a horror movie over and over. Eventually the scare of the jump wears off.

And that’s all that Steve really needs from him, isn’t it?

Bucky knows he’d prefer the original version of himself, they both would. But Steve has survived this long without Sergeant Bucky Barnes; he can make do with this version. This version that's willing to endure therapy and doctors and observation, just for the chance to get better. So long as Bucky keeps at it, they should be okay. So long as Bucky keeps trying, they should be okay. So long as Bucky can keep from startling at the monsters, they should be okay.

Bucky can do at least that, can’t he?

“Can we stop now?” he says, “I think I got what I needed. At least for today.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Instead of working on grad school applications, I spent four hours researching and writing this. Here are my sources:
> 
> [EMDR International Association](https://www.emdria.org/page/emdr_therapy)  
> [WebMD](https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/emdr-what-is-it#1)  
> [This video of an EMDR session](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpRQvcW2kUM)  
> [This informational video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKrfH43srg8)
> 
> Please let me know if I misstepped in anyway. I'll fix it immediately.


End file.
